Environmental News, Articles & Information | Global Warming News | EcoWorld

A “Sverdrup,” named after the famed Norwegian geologist who defined this unit of measure, is the largest quantity commonly used to express volumes of water flow. Naturally, the highest volumes of water flowing on this planet are ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream, which warms Europe and flows at a rate of of 30 to 150 Sverdrups, depending on latitude.

So how much water is in a Sverdrup, after all? Apparently, one Sverdrup is equivalent to “one million cubic meters of water per second.” In practical terms this is equivalent to delivering one cubic kilometer of water (weighing exactly one gigaton) in just under seventeen minutes. That is one heck of a lot of water. That is a very big pipeline.

And what do Sverdrups have to do with brine? It has to do with whether or not to approve construction of desalination plants, which if built using modern technology all over the world, would eliminate world water scarcity. Apparently environmentalist conventional wisdom says it’s ok to install marine current turbines and offshore windmills and tidal hydro installations, but one cannot lay a pipeline capable of transporting tens of cubic kilometers per year of brine into an ocean current, because it will make the ocean saltier. But this objection completely overlooks the volume of offshore marine currents, expressed in Sverdrups.

Brine comes from desalination plants. “Brine” is a painfully misleading word, since normally a desalination plant returns seven parts of slightly saltier water, referred to as brine, to the ocean for each unit of fresh water that is extracted from the seawater. At less than 20% saltier than the ocean, it doesn’t take much current to easily disburse this volume of brine.

A cubic kilometer (km3) of fresh water can easily sustain 3.0 million people in residential urban and suburban settings, since one cubic kilometer is sufficient to provide 241 gallons per day per person to a million people – 913 liters per day per person! This would work in places such as greater Los Angeles, since with seven km3 of brine for every km3 of recovered fresh water, desalinating water for sixty million residents would only require 140 km3 per year of water to get dumped into the California channel. Wow! 140 cubic kilometers of brine discharge per year! 34 cubic miles! That’s a lot of seawater, 16% saltier, going into any ocean, isn’t it?

No. Just one Sverdrup of current volume is equal to 31,558 cubic kilometers per year. This means in a one Sverdrup current the brine discharge pipes from desalination plants servicing 60 million people would disburse brine that, per year, would increase the salinity of the current by a mere seven one-hundredths of one percent. And in the California current which is at least several Sverdrups even fairly close to shore, the impact of brine from 60 million people’s water desalination would probably be at most a tenth of that, or seven one-thousandths of one percent, especially when one considers the subsurface to surface upwellings, different currents, which also move Sverdrup volumes of water per year off the coast of California.

As for power requirements, a cubic kilometer of fresh water can be extracted from the sea for less energy than it takes to pump this water over the Tehachapi Mountains. So if you like wave and current and tidal energy, break out the underwater bulldozers and while you’re at it, desalinate water for Southern California, and turn off the pumps.

There is an interesting futurist website entitled “Evolution Shift” authored by David Houle that recently reported on “the Air Car.” If you haven’t yet heard of the Air Car, from Moteur Developpment International in France, you aren’t alone. We’d heard of MDI’s Air Car, but when we set out to really research the development, we learned there is a surprising lack of information available, other than a handful of online forum commentaries and the company’s own website.

Apparently the car’s engine runs on compressed air, and the prototype is reputed to have a range of several hundred kilometers. In recent months, the company website has announced a hybrid design – on their “how it works” page they claim the engine now has the ability to run on gasoline or air, or a combination of both. This is all very interesting, but let’s focus on the notion of compressed air as a way to store energy to propell a vehicle. How much energy can you store?

Basically, if you expend a certain amount of horsepower-hours (1.3 horsepower hours = one kilowatt-hour) pumping air into the tank, at a certain efficiency – say 90% – for the compressor, then that amount of energy is available to turn the wheels. Any more than that is creating energy from nothing.

One way to store hydrogen on a vehicle is to compress the gas into a pressure vessel, and when we looked at the energy required to compress hydrogen to 5,000 PSI, the energy we expended to compress the gas was equivalent to 5% of the energy in the hydrogen, and the biggest 5,000 PSI tank we could find for a vehicle (it was 24″ diameter, 28″ long, and weighed 600 pounds) only held 4.0 kilograms of hydrogen, containing energy of about 700,000 BTUs. This suggests a large 5,000 PSI tank of air would hold (.05 x 700,000) about 35,000 BTUs, which is the energy equivalent of less than a third of one gallon of gas. Even at 100% efficiency releasing compressed air into the air car’s motor to create traction, this will not give you any meaningful range.

The Air Car claims to have a unique engine design, and perhaps there are engineering innovations in this design that will have utility for stretching combustible fuels – but when it comes to running a car on compressed air, consider me a giant skeptic.

What is significant about Houle’s post is his comment “What the compressed air car points to is the fact that humanity has the technological capability of solving our energy problems as they relate to transportation.” Whether or not cars will ever run on compressed air – they probably won’t – is missing this point. Automobiles are poised to make a technological leap as significant as Henry Ford’s Model T. Over at General Motors, VP of R&D Larry Burns calls it “the new automotive DNA.”

We are on the verge of seeing the automobile completely reinvented – with zero pollution and using flexible sources of fuel, of course, but also with radically improved safety features, and autopilot. That innovations such as the air car are being experimented is one example of the unfolding revolution in automotive transportation. The automobile age is about to get very, very interesting.

In the Kittitas Valley, about 12 miles northwest of Ellensburg, Washington, a 65 turbine windfarm is in the final stages of approval. This windfarm will consume 6,000 acres, nearly ten square miles, and given each turbine is atop a 410 foot tower, it is reasonable to assume these are going to be very large generators, with a yield of 2.5 megawatts each. So this $150 million project will produce 165 megawatts of energy, or about 16 megawatt-years per square mile.

To put this in perspective, energy consumption in the USA in 2006 was just about 100 quadrillion BTUs, or about 25% of total worldwide energy consumption. Since 1 “quad” BTU equals 33.4 gigawatt-years of electricity, the total energy consumption of the USA, expressed in units of electric power equates to 3,340 gigawatt-years.

The reason all of this matters is because (1) we are moving to an energy economy that relies increasingly on electricity, and (2) Al Gore’s “pledge” requires the USA to reduce CO2 emissions by 50% within 20 years – which in practical terms means decommissioning fossil fuel plants and replacing them with things like wind generators.

So if our state-of-the-art wind generating towers can yield 16 megawatt-years of power per square mile, if we were to rely on wind power to accomplish Al Gore’s mandate, i.e., generate 50 quadrillion BTUs per year (1,670 gigawatt-years of electricity per year) using windmills, we would have to consume 104,000 square miles of land.

The question isn’t really whether or not there is enough land to do this – there probably is. The real question is why are environmentalists, who have fought every land development initiative in the USA for the last 30 years, behind wind power? These are the same people who have erected Berlin Walls around every city in the country, walls euphemistically called “urban service boundaries” in order to prevent “leapfrog growth,” and preserve “open space.”

Environmental lobbyists are more powerful than they’ve ever been, financed now not only with tax-deductible contributions from the public, and “reconveyance fees” assessed on every home sale (a growing phenomenon – watch out), but also today with “carbon offset” funds.

Returning to the Kittitas Valley in Washington state, these wealthy environmentalists, backed by wind energy corporations who are thrilled to milk the anti-CO2 hysteria for all it’s worth, are cramming this massive wind installation down the throats of the local residents. We received an email yesterday from a local homeowner in Kittitas Valley. Here is what they said:

“I live in Kittitas County in Washington state. Our county commissioners voted no on 2 sites that are located near homes. The 2 companies, Horizon and EnXco preempted local government and went to EFSEC, a committee appointed by the Governor and they said YES to the corporations. This is the first time in history local government has been overturned on land use issues.”

There is nothing wrong with building wind generators. But environmentalists are selective in what land use they approve and what land use they fight. They don’t want us to have land for homes unless we are in “smart growth” (translation ultra high-density) “pedestrian friendly” (translation, nobody goes there because you can’t park), “transit villages” (translation – light rail boondoggles) where people are forced to live at a population density comparable to Singapore. This is all to preserve sacred open space. In California this is the reason homes on 4,000 square foot lots cost $500K.

But when it comes to wind generators – environmentalists don’t care. The same land that is too sacred to allow housing will get covered with wind farms – and all of the financial muscle the environmentalists employed to fight against developments of homes is used to fight for developments of wind farms.

Biofuel, another pet project of Washington’s governor, along with pretty much every other politician and environmentalist on earth, is far worse. To generate 50% of the power consumed in 2006 in the USA using biofuel – at a yield of 2,500 barrels per square mile per year (one quad BTU equals 179 million barrels of oil) we would need to replace 3.6 million square miles of land with biofuel plantations. And that is exactly what we are doing – from the Central Valley of California to the rainforests of the Amazon. But we have no room for housing.

Environmentalists today are not just a threat to property rights, they are a threat to the environment – at least when it comes to biofuel. And in the case of windmills, which one can argue make sense environmentally and financially, the environmentalists are hypocrites – employing a standard when considering housing developments that is precisely opposite the standard they employ when considering windfarm developments.

What looks like a giant football helmet, has three wheels, seats one driver (with six cubic feet of cargo space), does 0-60 mph in 12.5 seconds with a top speed of 75 mph, and has a range of 30 miles?

That would be the Myers Motors “NMG,” a nimble electric tricycle that is officially classified as a motorcycle, and costs virtually nothing to drive. There are now over 300 NMG (which stands for “no more gas”) vehicles being driven in several major cities in the USA, according to Myers Motors spokesperson Ron Huch.

THE ELECTRIC “NMG” TRICYCLE FROM MYERS MOTORS

Length 112″, width 52″, height 57″.

There’s a lot to like about this practical commuter vehicle, that looks like a cross between a Volkswagon Bug and a motorcycle. Fully enclosed, with three 13″ tires and disc brakes, this vehicle is designed for all weather driving.

With a 30+ horsepower motor, the NMG isn’t going to burn up the road, but at around $.02 per mile for electricity, the costs to operate the car are negligible, and 75 mph is generally enough for rush hour. Whether or not the NMG is a bargain at nearly $27,000 is debatable, but compared to other electric cars they are the most affordable option. Certainly if the NMG lives up to the promise of ultra low maintenance compared to gasoline-powered vehicles, the $27,000 investment could be a competitive option.

How many other $27,000 vehicles will let you drive to work rain or shine, cost you $.02 per mile, never require fillups, be allowed to drive in the carpool lane, and carry a fairly large amount of cargo? Myers Motors, LLC, is privately held and based in Tallmadge, Ohio.

Later today, when somewhere in this world begins the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of the new millenium, the concert heard round the world will start, and global warming consciousness will continue to build. Now we have a pledge that all 2.0 billion likely listeners will be urged to sign. On Larry King Live yesterday, Al Gore denied this has anything to do with politics, stating that global warming is a moral issue.

7th day of 7th month of 7th year, the world generation awakens.

But with a pledge being presented to 2.0 billion people, and climate crisis trainer training camps in full bloom around the planet, this is not just a moral issue. This is the biggest political mobilization in the history of mankind. So the most constructive thing we can do is take what must include an incredible amount of positive energy, and help keep the juggernaut in touch with reality. To that end, here are some considerations presented as an alternative seven point pledge:

1. Gore: To demand that my country join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90 per cent in developed countries and by more than half worldwide for the next generation to inherit a healthy earth.

Redwood: To recognize the “climate crisis” is useful as a propaganda campaign for pragmatic interests with multiple agendas, helping to create a mob mentality that may have devastating consequences for our personal and economic freedoms.

2. Gore: To take personal action to help solve the climate crises by reducing my own CO2 pollution;

Redwood: To recognize that CO2 is not a pollutant, indeed, that plants cannot survive without it. To recognize that emphasizing CO2 emissions reduction takes the emphasis away from reducing genuinely unhealthy air pollution, such as ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and particulates.

3. Gore: To fight for moratorium on construction of any new facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store the CO2;

Redwood: To recognize 90% of the world’s energy comes from burning; 80% from fossil fuel. To understand that trying to inject CO2 underground is probably not feasible, could be dangerous, and could be an incredibly expensive waste. To realize that we are burning rainforests to grow biofuel; to realize that biofuel is not carbon neutral and is not going to replace fossil fuel; to fight to stop rainforest destruction.

4. Gore: To work for a dramatic increase in energy efficiency of my home, workplace, school and transportation;

Redwood: To support energy efficiency technologies, but not through product bans or rationing. Further, to also support increasing energy production.

5. Gore: To fight for laws and policies that expand use of renewable energy sources and reduce dependence on oil and coal;

Redwood: To fight for laws that expand all sources of clean energy, and to recognize that over-regulation stifles innovation and leads to destructive waste of resources.

6. Gore: To plant new trees and to join with others in preserving and protecting forests;

Redwood: To plant trees, recognizing that tropical deforestation is a more significant threat to global climate than industrial CO2 emissions, especially since meaningful restoration of tropical rainforests is far more feasible than reducing CO2 emissions.

7. Gore: To buy from businesses and support leaders who share my commitment.

Redwood: To stop demonizing businesses and to recognize that the ideology of total control of land and production that underlies radical environmentalism requires tyrannical governments.